


The Adventure of the Blue Box

by Waid



Category: And Comes To A Curious Peace, Doctor Who, In Which The Author Works Out Her Own Issues With Ten, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Canon Compliant, Crack, Crack and Angst, Crossover, Gen, Not Beeblock, Victorian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 20:03:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2321603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waid/pseuds/Waid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The real reason Holmes didn't come straight home after The Final Problem? A certain Time Lord still can't land the TARDIS properly. </p><p> </p><p>  <i> “Here,” the man protests. “That’s enough out of you. I just rescued you, you know.”</i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>“I have just nearly died and had my understanding of the universe turned on its head, you know,” snaps Holmes, “It has been altogether a most trying day.”</i></p><p> </p><p>(Finally reposting from Livejournal)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Holmes feels his victory and its price in the same instant. Moriarty clutches at him and tries to hurl himself forward but it’s done, it’s too late, they have both slipped too far. Holmes’ heart lurches in anticipation as his feet leave the rock, as his weight and Moriarty’s drag him, head downwards, into the air.  
A dreadful howl breaks from Moriarty. Holmes draws a breath, lets the emptiness take him in silence. He lets Moriarty go, and, free of each other, finally, _finally_ they are falling between the floating sheets of atomised water.  
  
It is, as he allowed himself to hope when he first understood the shape of his approaching death, almost exhilarating, almost like flight. The cool wet air sings past him. He resists the temptation to close his eyes. He wants to see it all, he wants everything these last seconds have for him –  
  
Light breaking into arcs of colour in the spray, the milky boiling of the water below him, the black rocks that will break him, and, oh, a kind of peace, safety at last from whatever it is that’s chased him all these years. And yet is seems he does want more, he wants _everything_ and –  
  
Directly below him, where there was nothing but mist and spray – hanging, impossibly unsupported in space – is ... something. The small, square, blue-painted _roof_ of, of –  
  
The breath is knocked out of Holmes by the impact. He slides a little and clings automatically to – to _what_ , for God’s sake?  
  
Moriarty’s shriek rings one last time and breaks off. Dead. While Holmes is alive, to all appearances, and spreadeagled upon... _an object_ , hovering in mid-air.  
  
He sits up, gripping warily at the edges of the... _structure_ , and looks from this unexpected angle at the falls and confirms that there is nothing holding him up. And then the... _box_ upon which he is perched begins an abrupt ascent towards the sky.  
  
Holmes, who a moment before was plummeting to his death in open-eyed silence, screams.  
  
“Everything all right up there?” inquires a sympathetic, Estuary-accented voice from somewhere beneath him.  
  
The box swoops up past the cliffs and for a moment, Holmes is face to whiskered face with an extremely startled Colonel Sebastian Moran. They stare at one another in a kind of brief solidarity of utter shock. Then Moran collects himself very creditably and starts shooting at him.  
  
“Oh, whoops,” says the voice from below, as bullets bounce off the wooden walls of the... _thing_ and Holmes ducks and clutches at the edges for dear life. “Time we were going. Get in.” A hand closes around Holmes’ ankle and Holmes screams again.  
  
“Come on, get in!” repeats his rescuer and it is really most impressive that Moran is managing to make so many hits on such a rapidly moving target. Holmes sees no option but to scramble down, half-dragged by his as-yet-unseen saviour. He finds himself reeling on the threshold of something called a _police box_ – and don’t they have those in Glasgow? – and almost topples again towards the chasm but someone seizes him by the shirt-front and drags him inside. He collapses onto the floor of an extremely _large_ room, and lies there, gasping.  
  
A wild-haired, wild-eyed man in a brown pin-stripe suit, apparently roughly his own age, tall and thin as himself, crouches over him, beaming. He seizes Holmes’ hand and starts pumping it energetically up and down.  
  
“Why?” inquires Holmes, weakly, and for now, can’t manage another word.  
  
The stranger fairly capers before him. “Oh, Mr Holmes, MISTER SHERLOCK HOLMES –” he appears to relish every syllable. “It is my HONOUR. I am SUCH a fan!” He releases Holmes’ hand at last and flings his arms wide, apparently indicating everything in the cavernous, copper-coloured chamber and himself at once. “Oh, oh, oh, oh! Go on, do the the thing!”  
  
“The what?” croaks Holmes.  
  
“YOUR thing! The detectiving, deducing thing! The, the, the, the, when you, when you just like GLANCE at someone and know EVERYTHING. Because I think it’s BRILLIANT. ”  
  
Holmes recoils slightly and closes his eyes under this barrage of enthusiasm. His new acquaintance does not seem to be able to go more than a few words at a time without shouting. And Holmes is aching from the impact with the roof of this impossible machine and with Moriarty’s blows; his heart is still racing – his _heart_ is still _racing_ , which it shouldn’t be, because he is supposed to be _dead_. He is not in any mood to perform tricks for the amusement of this... this person.  
  
However, even with his eyes now shut, the tide of impressions is still coursing through his unwilling brain, and he must start to sift it into sense or it will drown him. He breathes, “You are not human.” The stranger chuckles encouragingly. Ice creeps down Holmes’ spine, but he continues, “This chamber is part of a craft... which travels both space and time.”  
  
“That’s what I’m talking about!” bellows the stranger. “That’s some really good deducing, that is. Most people are just like, ‘ooooh, the inside is bigger than the outside!’ and ‘eeeeh, who ARE you?’ But YOU’RE like –WHOOSH!” He waves his hands about, clicking his fingers several times in front of Holmes’ face. “Working it all out.” He taps, irritatingly, on Holmes’ skull with his knuckles. “Just a little monkey brain in there, but don’t you make it go?”  
  
Holmes grimaces and stares up at him, fixing the stranger with his sharpest and most ruthless gaze. He says more loudly, “Despite not being one of us, you are obsessively preoccupied with our species. This conversation furnishes us with proof of two planets inhabited by intelligent beings; I must assume that there are many more. Yet with countless worlds to explore, Earth is, perhaps, your favourite, and you seem to hold my own nation in particular esteem.”  
  
The man grins and bounces like one of the Irregulars with a cream bun. “Oh, go on,” he bubbles happily. “How’d you do all that?”  
  
“Surely to a being such as yourself it is quite transparent. The discrepancy between the internal and external dimensions of this extraordinary craft is, in itself, almost sufficient to tell me everything. The unity of space and time is an ancient concept; it is hardly likely that a vessel that violates all laws associated with space so entirely should find time any challenge at all. I suppose it might just be feasible that mankind might at some very distant time create such things. However those illuminated symbols upon that column must be a form of writing, but I am quite sure they are not from any script of Earth. And finally," his voice wavers very slightly, "You have a second, asynchronous pulse in your throat where no pulse should be: You have two hearts. As to your fixation with humanity, you rescued me, and you appear to know me. It is unlikely a creature who would act so would choose me as your sole protégé. Then there is your accent, and your suit, which is oddly cut, yet is nothing more exotic than wool. There is a banana on the floor. There are biscuit crumbs on your shirt. You smell faintly of tea. And I can see no signs of similar attachment to any other place – the alien devices I see around me all appear quite functional. All your little comforts are of Earth.”  
  
The stranger rubs his hands exultantly, his eyes shining with glee. “Yeah, I love it. Sherlock Hooooolmes, in my TARDIS. Anyway, I’m the Doctor, this...”  
  
He’s about to bound to his feet and move on to other topics. Holmes has thus far delivered his remarks while still lying, limp as a wet rag, on the curiously curved metallic floor. He sits up now and holds the stranger in place with a firm grip to the shoulder. “You asked for my my observations; I have not finished them. You are estranged from your own kind, or you are the only survivor of an otherwise extinct race, or perhaps both. You pride yourself on saving lives and doing good works. But you arrogate to yourself more authority than belongs to any mortal creature – and you _are_ mortal, I think, though you are far longer-lived than we.”  
  
It is, he must admit, satisfying to make this ancient, boisterous, meddling being back slightly away from him in alarm. “Here,” the man protests. “That’s enough out of you. I just rescued you, you know.”  
  
“I have just nearly died and had my understanding of the universe turned on its head, you know,” snaps Holmes, “It has been altogether a most trying day.” He flops back for a moment on the floor, and murmurs, “I was ready to die.”  
  
“Rubbish!” chirps the stranger, whose mood has apparently veered back towards manic exuberance. “You’re not ready to die at all. Die?! You?! Sherlock Holmes?! Die?! Falling off a waterfall?! NOOOO!” The last word is a cheerful yet rather terrifying drawn-out howl. He leaps over to a bank of strange switches and buttons, slams a lever and there is an extraordinary lurching that seems to set Holmes’ every cell shivering with the strangeness of it. ”Oh, no, Mr Holmes. The universe isn’t finished with you yet. And by the way a _thank you_ would be nice.”  
  
“Thank you,” concedes Holmes, passing a still-trembing hand over his face and then getting up. “You said you are...?”  
  
“The Doctor.”  
  
“Where are you taking me, Doctor?”  
  
‘The Doctor’ is plainly the only name the man is likely to give him, but Holmes does not feel particularly happy about it. As far as he is concerned, “The Doctor” is somebody else. The Doctor eclipses and predominates the whole of his profession...  
  
“I dunno,” answers _this_ Doctor. “Where would you like?”  
  
Holmes tries to work out to connect this experience with events back on the ground. “I must return to Meiringen at once.”  
  
“Got to mind that bloke with the gun, though,” warns the Doctor.  
  
“But my friend... Oh, heavens, he will find my note. What he will think...”  
  
“Well, sure,” agrees the Doctor. “Sure, of course you have to go BACK, yeah, obviously, you have to go BACK, but, have you ever fancied seeing the ruins on the Eye of Orion, or the crimson lightning over the Pyramids of Sava first?”  
  
“You are... speaking of other worlds,” whispers Holmes, and an electric thrill of curiosity and terror and awe courses through him, headier than anything he’s ever pumped into his veins.  
  
The Doctor shoves his hands in his pockets and grins smugly. “Oh yeah. Could use someone around who’s almost as clever as me.”  
  
“But I ... I have no time, I cannot allow people to believe that I’m...”  
  
“Mr Holmes. What did you just deduce? I can take you right back to whenever you like.”  
  
This is a statement, Holmes will later discover, that should have been made only with certain important qualifications.  
  
* * *  
  
Six weeks later, (The Doctor is very vague about time aboard the TARDIS but Holmes keeps track of the days in one of the TARDIS’s many bathrooms by paying attention to the rate of growth of stubble on his jaw), Holmes is a discontented prey to conflicting sentiments.  
  
He wonders how he will ever be able to go home. After _all this_ , after staring into the birth of a galaxy, after witnessing the of the construction of the Colossus at Rhodes, after the adventure of the Queen of Calasra, after learning the extraordinary secret of the Wheel of Ufiolos, surely London – _Victorian_ London, as he has come to think of it – will seem intolerably small. His mind will be so cramped he thinks he might even die of it. The worthiest opponent of his own place and time is dead, after all. _He_ is supposed to be dead. (Though there is still Moran, about whom he really will have to do something before he is very much older). And out here there are Tetraps and Chronovores and Sontarans, there are a vast number of things that are unhealthily preoccupied with destroying the Earth and a smaller but still sizeable group that wish to destroy the universe entire.  
  
He and the Doctor hurtle about the place, _stopping_ them.  
  
Sometimes, he thinks all it would need to make this unexpected extension of his life perfect would be to persuade _This_ Doctor to swing past Earth again and scoop up _The_ Doctor. He imagines Watson at his side, running up corridors and through labyrinths and over heaths and along beaches and down more corridors, (there is a lot of running) and shooting Exxilons with his service revolver and scribbling everything down in his notebook afterwards...  
  
(Though for whom? No one would _believe_ these stories – would _The Strand_ accept them as fiction?)  
  
It never quite seems to fit, he cannot convince himself Watson belongs out here. The Doctor would probably confiscate his revolver, for a start, which would be sure to annoy him. (The Doctor is perfectly happy to avail of himself of things with buttons and levers that wreak inevitable obliteration upon their foes but for some reason guns are out). Some of the things he has seen – the destruction of planets, the deaths of innocents, and the century of dreadful carnage which is about to dawn upon their own world – they have all shaken Holmes badly, but he thinks they would have broken Watson’s heart. And what about Mrs Watson... he winces a little. No, Watson has his life, which Holmes has a bad habit of endangering, and perhaps if Holmes had a scrap of decency he would stay here among the stars until the poisoned tentacles of a Closrophraw or the psionic sword of a Keshian Warrior get him, and leave him to it. He is supposed to be dead, after all, so in a sense it surely does not matter what he does.  
  
But no, he cannot commit himself to living and never seeing his friend again. Sooner or later, then, he must go home.  
  
And there is _this_ Doctor.  
  
The Time Lord is an fascinating creature, a fitting subject for endless study. Unique, it seems, even within his own lost race of chrononautical Titans – brilliant, mercurial, heroic. Holmes has never been _bored_ in the Doctor’s company, not for an instant. It is not that he does not _like_ the Doctor, exactly, and certainly not that he is ungrateful.  
  
He has, however, very often wanted to throttle him.  
  
The man’s self-regard is so immense that Holmes wonders how even the infinite reaches of the TARDIS manage to contain it. Holmes has never counted modesty among the virtues before but dear heavens, if there was ever a creature to teach him the value of it. Holmes has learned to dread the almost inevitable moment in their every adventure when some imperilled victim or sneering monster has the folly to ask him, “ _Who are you_?”  
  
“I’m the Doctor,” Holmes hears, echoing from somewhere below while he is crawling through the ventilation system of a gigantic space-prison adrift in the Horsehead Nebula, trying to sabotage the device that’s about to poison them all, with a young lady called Bethany Brown behind him. “I’m the last of the Time Lords. I’m the man who’s going to break open those gates and set every prisoner on this ship free, and then I’m going to bring the sunlight back to that planet down there...” And Holmes can just picture the way his stern, pale countenance breaks into a daft and boundlessly self-admiring grin even from here... “And if you’re very, very lucky, I’m going to let you watch me do it.”  
  
“ _Oh good God please shut up,_ ” Holmes grits out through his teeth to the indignant surprise of Bethany whom, the Doctor ‘snogged’, as he put it, half an hour ago, and thinks the Doctor is marvellous.  
  
And yes, yes, of course he _is_. If he is arrogant he has every reason to be. He thinks he is extraordinary and he _is_ extraordinary, he thinks he is brilliant and he _is_ brilliant. Though, capacious as it may be, Holmes considers the Doctor’s mind to be lamentably ill-disciplined. “ _Will_ you,” he growls, one night on the third moon of Paxicafarolon, “Kindly try to concentrate on the matter in hand?”  
  
To which the Doctor replies, “Yeah, you’ve got a point OH LOOK A HUGE FISH,” and runs off. Holmes sighs, lifts his eyes to the emerald sky, and follows.  
  
He has been doing a lot of _following_ lately.  
  



	2. Chapter 2

Bethany has nowhere particular to go after they destroy the prison ship; the human colony on the planet below is free and bathed in sunlight again, but Bethany’s family were disintegrated before her eyes when she was only a child. So she knocks around with them in the TARDIS for a while.   
  
She is much preoccupied with trying to ease the Doctor’s woes. “It’s a good thing he’s got us, isn’t it, Mr Holmes?” she says, as they pursue a lost baby Chaffaru through the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, some summer day during the sixth century before Christ. She would prefer to call him Sherlock, social mores evidently being pretty informal in the 34th century where she comes from, but she has accepted that this makes Holmes terribly uncomfortable. “He’s like our _guardian angel_ , the way he swooped in and saved us both, and yet he’s so sad underneath. Like a lonely little boy.”  
  
Holmes wonders if the furtive eyeroll he gives when Bethany isn’t looking is unworthy. It is true that the Doctor is, at times, intensely sad. And he has every right to be. Holmes is often very sad, after all, and he is not even sure exactly why, he certainly does not have the excuse of the loss of his whole planet and species, for heaven’s sake. Close as he now knows it’s come, a few times. The Doctor’s loneliness is entirely understandable.  
  
Sometimes, however, Holmes does gets a little sick of people going on about it all the time.   
  
He warns Bethany, “Do bear in mind he is more than sixty times your age, Miss Brown.”  
  
Bethany may be annoyingly sentimental where the Doctor is concerned, but she is bright enough. She frowns, and then gives Holmes a sunny grin. “Oh come on. He’s only forty-five times my age. He said he’s nine hundred and seven.”  
  
“He lies,” says Holmes, darkly.   
  
“There it is!” cries Bethany, pouncing on the baby alien and bundling it up in her coat. They carry it, squirming, back to the TARDIS. The Doctor is nowhere to be seen.  
  
“What’s happened to him?” Bethany frets.   
  
Holmes looks around and points to a silvery trail of drying mucus on a sun-warmed marble wall, and then the prints of the curious shoes called ‘converse’ in the sand. “The Doctor has engaged the creature’s mother,” he says. “Either he is chasing it, or it is chasing him.”   
  
“Either way...” says Bethany.   
  
“Run,” Holmes agrees.   
  
“You know,” says Bethany, as they follow the trail, “Apart from how you can’t regenerate or give people amnesia, and apart from how you don’t have a time machine or two hearts or really good hair, you’re a lot like him.”  
  
Holmes swallows back a childish cry of “I am not!” and instead says, “My dear Miss Brown, the comparison is fanciful.”  
  
But he has already had moments of reluctant awareness that the things that infuriate him most about the Doctor – the bursts of wild energy punctuated by fits of depressive moping, the assumption he is always the most brilliant and compelling person anyone has ever met – are uncomfortably familiar.  
  
The Doctor praises Holmes to the skies whenever he so much as points out the tooth-marks on a corpse do _not_ match the fangs of the creature the locals say inflicted the wound, yet Holmes always feels faintly suspicious he is not being taken quite seriously. As for Bethany, the Doctor seems not to have lured her into anything more improper than the occasional “snog”, but he drinks up her admiration, her constant desire to please and help him, and what does Bethany _really_ get back for it?   
  
Holmes is rather afraid this is how he treats Watson all the time.   
  
When he goes home, he resolves, he will change.   
  
Well, at least he will try.  
  
Well. While he is engaging in all this honesty and self-awareness, he might as well admit that probably he will not try. But he _will_ be more appreciative.  
  
God, even his thoughts are starting to _sound_ like the Doctor.  
  
* * *  
  
That night, (if it is ever really night when one is rattling around the Time Vortex) Holmes suddenly sits up in bed having deduced that Bethany’s mother and sister are _not_ dead but had actually been teleported to a mining ship in an asteroid field . A quick rescue later the family is reunited and it’s just the Holmes and the Doctor again.   
  
Holmes had, it is true, begun to feel a certain... _companionship_ with Bethany, unusual for him, but then he has never been compelled to share lodgings with a young lady before. But the resolution to her case is so satisfying that he really has no reason to think of her again. The Doctor, however, misses her. The Doctor misses a lot of people, it seems. A great number of people seem to have travelled with him, judging from the contents of the large wardrobe room, and most of them seem to have been young ladies. The Doctor drops hints at unguarded moments but will not be drawn on exactly what happened to them. “ _Gone_ ,” is all he’ll say when pressed.  
  
Holmes pieces together what clues he can and constructs certain theories. This one left for something better. That one is stuck in a parallel universe. What became of the woman whose strands of long, auburn hair he finds clinging to a feathered hat in an abandoned box, he can _not_ work out. A few of them are certainly dead. But, hearteningly for his own future, mostly they seem to have survived.  
  
And yet the Doctor seems to consider them _all_ irretrievable– even though they are not all, like the Doctor’s people, erased from history. Holmes can supply explanations: the pain, for an extremely long-lived being, of watching very mortal friends age – alongside the Doctor’s extreme proneness to distraction. But still, he finds it curious that the Doctor never seems to go back, and the thought makes him strangely uneasy. “ _I_ will come back,” he promises inwardly to the only two people he misses himself.  
  
As far as they are concerned, he will never even have left.  
  
* * *  
  
The Doctor does not believe in any God, and looks faintly disappointed and pitying when he discovers Holmes does. This does not bother Holmes unduly; he does not consider proselytising to Time Lords to be his job. That the Doctor sometimes talks about himself as if he were all three persons of the Trinity and six or seven other persons thrown in for good measure, bothers him far more. It is downright blasphemous.  
  
It does not help that from time to time the very universe seems to conspire in the Doctor’s posturing. A star in the distance goes supernova and frames his tousled head in a perfect halo _just_ as he has managed to mend a matter-replicator to supply five thousand starving people stranded on a crippled warship in the Sagittarius Star Cloud with food. The machine emits a surprisingly musical – an almost _choral_ – hum and starts turning out bread and fishes. Holmes groans.   
  
He could almost take these incidents as signs the Doctor really is touched by the divine, but damn it, he refuses to take them as evidence of anything but the fact that the universe is _stupid_ sometimes. And he will not encourage the Doctor’s messianic antics.   
  
But they meet plenty of people who will.  
  
“He has descended among us from the heavens!” burbles the Priestess of Rahyldra, fixing the Doctor with her mad eyes. “The Lonely God, the one who wanders the darkness, forever a stranger, he who dies and rises again like the sun...” She glances vaguely at Holmes. “...And his companion.”  
  
Holmes scowls. He and the Doctor are currently chained to pillars and about to be fed to gigantic, iridescent, Halvragar Worms. But the Doctor gets _that look_ which warns Holmes that even when they get out of this he’s in for days of moping.   
  
It turns out that under the Temple of Rahyldra is an ancient superweapon that is, inevitably, about to go off and kill everyone on the planet. The Doctor ends up saving them all by channeling a ray of deadly epsilon energy through himself. This very nearly kills him, and _somehow_ it is necessary in the course of this that he must be bathed in ethereal light, and when he falls back, miraculously still alive, he must have his arms stretched wide, and a martyred expression on his face.   
  
“Oh! _Snap out of it_!” snarls Holmes, charging across the room and grabbing the crumpled Doctor away from the jaws of a Halvragar Worm which is back and hungrier than ever.   
  
* * *  
  
They have a furious row after the Doctor finds the notes Holmes has been making on various topics throughout most of his stay.   
  
Holmes has examined the TARDIS carefully, but without such an unimaginable source of power on Earth as the Eye of Harmony, it seems likely that the secret of time travel will remain out of his reach. However, he has come to certain conclusions on sonic waves and their applications that, while incomplete (and after all he is not a physicist), may prove useful with further study and the involvement of the Royal Society.   
  
The field of forensics, of course, has always fascinated him, and he has seen astonishing conclusions drawn from a mere drop of blood – even a single cell. “DNA” is a term the Doctor bandied about in his hearing and it is clear it is part of the answer. Holmes puzzled over it for days and then remembered Miescher’s experiments, which he had studied years ago during his own investigations into haemoglobin. _Nuclein_. Amino acids. Their properties must be explored in more detail. He was also highly struck by the advances to be made – relatively soon but too late for so many – in the field of antibiotics.  
  
The Doctor snatches the notebook, tosses it through an unexpected hatch in the TARDIS’ wall and ejects it into space.  
  
“Britannia not ruling enough waves, is it?” the Doctor cries, “Going to make it mightier yet? Not on my watch.”   
  
“I thought I could, at least,” says Holmes stiffly, “Prevent quite so many children dying of typhus. I could catch more criminals. I could save innocent men from the noose. ”  
  
“Well, tough. You knew you weren’t supposed to do this. Oh, you knew all right, or you wouldn’t have hidden it from me.”  
  
“I did not consider your approval as a factor one way or the other, strange as it may sound to you.”  
  
“Well you should have! Before you ran around stealing things you’re not supposed to have!”  
  
“I stole nothing! I merely observed!”  
  
“HOLMES,” howls the Doctor, exasperated, “Time Lord stuff – _future_ stuff – stuff from 3368 – is not supposed to be in 1891! You KNOW that!”  
  
“But gentlemen from 1891 are supposed to be 3368?” protests Holmes. “Young ladies from 3368 are supposed to be in pre-Christian Babylon? Doctor, from one end of time to another, my presence has already wrought incalculable historic changes. I have been the means by which innumerable anomalies have been created, and you are the one who created them! And you may destroy my notes, but I have knowledge I could never have attained had I remained in my own time, unless you propose to wipe it out of my head – ” his breath catches for an instant and he draws back, chilled, as it occurs to him – of course, the Doctor _could_. And yet he pushes on regardless, “Did you truly expect me not to reflect on what I saw? If so, allow me to say that bringing me along was most unwise. What is such a journey for if not to learn? What is knowledge for if not to be used? And if I may use what I know to help others in your company, then why not outside it? Not to mention what you do yourself! Why can you use the insights you have gained in your wanderings to save lives if I cannot?”  
  
The Doctor’s gesticulates wildly in the air. “There are just – _things you can’t do_! Not all lives are meant to be saved!”  
  
“Nor was mine!” shouts Holmes.  
  
“Yes,” the Doctor growls, “Yours was.”  
  
“Says who?”  
  
The Doctor folds his arms haughtily. “ _Me_.”  
  
There is a grinding pause while they glare at each other. Holmes’ fists close and open. At last he points out “You mean,‘I’.”  
  
It is somewhere between a genuine dig at the Doctor’s grammar and a joke meant to break the tension, and the Doctor takes it in the complicated spirit in which it is meant. His eyes flare with renewed annoyance and at the same time a half-smile twitches at his lips. For a moment they could almost let the argument drop and laugh.  
  
But not quite.  
  
“ _I_ ,” continues the Doctor, pointedly, “am a Time Lord. I know what I’m doing. You don’t.”  
  
“Do you?” hisses Holmes, freshly incensed. “To the untrained observer it often appears otherwise. Tell me more about _fixed points_ , for example; their precise nature seems to alter every time you mention the subject.”  
  
The flicker of humour wrenches away from the Doctor’s face leaving nothing but fury. He springs to the controls of the TARDIS and yanks at a lever. “Tell you what,” he says, slamming his fist onto another button. The doors fly open on a empty blue plain lit by frosty stars. “Why don’t you _walk home_ from here?”  
  
Holmes drags in an enraged breath but forces himself to be still, gritting his teeth. He stands motionless with the breeze of the alien world fluttering his hair.   
  
“Yes,” he says at last. “Of course you always have the power to do that. With that threat in your pocket, you have no need of a rational argument to compel me to make any concession you wish.” He brings his hands together in a parody of prayer. “I humbly beg that you will be merciful and not maroon me, you will take me home at once.”  
  
They glare at each other in taut silence. Then the Doctor grimaces and slams the doors shut. Holmes stalks off to his room.  
  
* * *  
  
The Doctor does not maroon him and nor does he take him directly home. Neither of them apologises but they spend a day in 16th Century Rome which is clearly meant as a conciliatory gesture, and as Holmes spends a fascinating afternoon talking to the young Lassus about chromaticism he can hardly help but appreciate it. For once, nothing goes wrong. The statues do not come to life. The nuns do not get possessed by anything. There are no screams for help. It is quite the quietest day Holmes has had since he tumbled off the Reichenbach Falls – well, since long before that, actually. When they run into Bruegel the Elder the Doctor still introduces him, as he has since their very first outing, as “my friend, Sherlock Holmes,” and though according to Holmes’ lights they are not friends – not because of the quarrel but because no one is your friend until you have known him a bare minimum of two years –he is, grudgingly, rather touched. He thinks of how the Doctor has the most innocent, open-hearted habit of grabbing the hand of whomever he happens to be running up a corridor or through a labyrinth with at the time. It is a little peculiar, but Holmes has got used to it. He wonders if he will miss the Doctor.  
  
He feels rather sorry when he concludes the answer is no.   
  
They sit on the Ponte Sisto in the evening sun.   
  
“You sure you want to go?” the Doctor asks.  
  
“Yes, I am,” says Holmes quietly. He is somehow no longer worried about London seeming small. “I must go home. My renewed thanks for the journey, Doctor, but let us conclude this so you may be on your way. I am sure somebody needs you.”  
  
The Doctor swings his legs like a schoolboy and chucks a pebble into the Tiber and grins at him. “But you don’t, do you, Mr Holmes?”  
  
“No,” says Holmes. “I do not.” Before this can sound too brutal he goes on, “And neither do you do need me. You need...”  
  
“...Someone to pass me my test tubes and tell me how brilliant I am?” supplies the Doctor lightly. “It’s been said before.”  
  
Holmes writhes with another uncomfortable pang of recognition.  
  
“I need to go home,” he repeats. “I need to see my Doctor."   
  
[](http://w-a-i-d.livejournal.com/7077.html)  
_  
_


	3. Chapter 3

Holmes’ first thought, of course, is to have the TARDIS drop him off just outside Meiringen, moments after he left. But he and the Doctor later agree this would be a mistake. Switzerland, as he left it, was not at all safe. Better if he returns to London, say, three days later, which will give him just enough time to have plausibly reached home. He can deal with Moran from there. Watson will have thought him dead for those days, which is unfortunate – well, it is worse than unfortunate, of course. But better than if he were dead in actual fact.   
  
The detective and the Time Lord shake hands on the threshold of the TARDIS and Holmes steps out into London.   
  
And immediately, he knows something is wrong. He swings round and calls “Doctor!” and sees the swaying willows solidifying through the TARDIS’ fading shape and then he is alone in the middle of Regent’s Park.  
  
The air is wrong. The leaves are barely budding on the trees. When he left, it was the fourth of May.   
  
A couple of months early, he thinks. Please, God, let that be all. He would only have to keep out of his own way for eight weeks or so and then pick up where he left off.  
  
He runs across the park. A pair of young ladies strolling across the bridge cause his lungs to clench on a breath, because their clothes... dark colours, skirts cut daringly high above the ankle... surely no one was dressed quite like that in the spring of 1891...   
  
Newspaper. _Newspaper_. A businessman is passing with a copy of _The Telegraph_ ; Holmes cannons across the grass and almost knocks the hapless man over as he snatches it from under his arm.   
  
  
The paper’s indignant owner is left trying to make up his mind whether or not to attempt retribution with his stick. He is, on the whole, too alarmed to risk it, especially when the wild-eyed newspaper thief barks “ _No_ ,” drops the paper on the grass, and charges away at an extraordinary pace towards York Bridge, before slowing, as if at a loss.  
  
* * *  
  
Hollowness spreads through Holmes as he realises he does not know where to go or what to do. But he is so close to Baker Street and he has no other ideas, so he wanders along to 221b and stares up at it wretchedly, like the ghost he almost is.   
  
The door has been repainted, a little over a year ago from the look of it. Pointless to go in. He knows someone else must be living in his rooms now. And yet his feet carry him up the steps to the front door as if of their own accord. This was his home for so long, he could feel its pull when he was galaxies away. He is far too close to drag himself away from it now.  
  
Poor Mrs Hudson goes into violent hysterics.  
  
Holmes, who is shaken enough himself, pats her clumsily and babbles something about having to pretend to be dead, and fails to fully consider that whatever story he produces now, he will be stuck with.  
  
His rooms, it turns out, have been kept just as they were, as a kind of _shrine_ to him. It is an extraordinary relief to discover that he still has a home after all, but it is any number of more painful things too. Mrs Hudson has actually placed a framed photograph of him on his desk with a little posy of early violets in front of it. Holmes’ mouth falls open at the sight of it and he turns to Mrs Hudson with a searching, stricken look she is still too far gone to notice.   
  
“Oh the poor Doctor,” says Mrs Hudson, when she is calm enough to speak coherently. “You must go and see him, Mr Holmes. He will be so delighted.”  
  
The words “poor Doctor” have been a bugbear to Holmes for most of the last three months, now they turn him cold. “Mrs Hudson,” he asks, apprehensively, “Is Dr Watson well?”   
  
Her face drops. “You didn’t know about Mrs Watson?”  
  
Two minutes later Holmes is back in Regent’s Park, beating at the ground where the TARDIS stood with an umbrella grabbed from the hatstand, shouting, “Come back! Three years! It was supposed to be three days!”  
  
* * *  
  
If making a spectacle of oneself in Regent’s Park is never a very rational course of action, it is particularly ill-advised when the second most dangerous man in London still has agents scattered all over London watching for one’s return. Holmes lurches back into Baker Street, ruefully rubbing his throat after an unpleasant if unchallenging run-in with a garroter named Parker, and takes it as a sign that he must start to consider matters logically and in the proper order.  
  
He throws himself into his old armchair and stares at Watson’s on the other side of the rug.  
  
Well. If he is going to address the Watson problem, he will have to be alive to do it. Therefore Moran must be the first order of business.  
  
In any case he _cannot_ face Watson yet.   
  
He slaps together a hasty disguise from his costume trunk, and scrambles out of 221b through a rear window and over a fence. Outside in the alley he contorts himself into an rheumatic hunch and limps out into London.  
  
In the Reading Room at the British Museum he hunts Moran through back issues of The Times and finds what he needs far more easily than he expects. Moran has just commited a murder. Holmes is certain his fingerprints are all over the Ronald Adair case, and is not even ashamed at the pang of triumph he feels. He can see the shape of the trap in which he can snare Moran already. Camden House is standing empty opposite 221b... a visit to the dead man’s house at Park Lane, and later one to Oscar Meunier’s... yes, he will soon have everything he needs.   
  
He also orders up old copies of _The Strand_ , and reads a piece called _The Final Problem_ , and has to grip the edge of the desk and clench his teeth to stop himself from uttering another cry of rage and guilt.  
  
* * *  
  
The library gives him an idea, and he picks up a stack of obscure books in Holborn on his way to Park Lane. There is already a small crowd of gawpers on the pavement outside the Adairs’ , clustered around some charlatan who fancies himself a detective. Holmes joins them, and studies the window above. The books have given his role more of a personality, and a profession, he feels safer in it now. Nevertheless, that is surely one of Moran’s men watching the crowd from across the street, and there is a cudgel inside his coat, and probably a jack-knife in his pocket...  
  
Someone – stepping back to get a better look up at the windows – knocks into him and he drops his books. Holmes growls with genuine annoyance and stoops to gather them up, while his inadvertent assailant tries to help, apologising all the while.  
  
“I’m so sorry,” says a voice he is not ready for yet. Holmes stares at the familiar hands offering him back _The Origin of Tree Worship_ , for a moment unable to lift his eyes to Watson’s face.  
  
Watson looks shocking. Oh, not to anyone else, he has not become a drunkard or a derelict; he is as neatly groomed and respectable as ever, and he is smiling down at Holmes in kindly apology. But the weight he gained during his marriage has dropped off him completely; there are dreadful shadows like bruises under his eyes, and the spring sunshine picks out threads of grey at his temples that were not there when Holmes said goodbye to him on the path to Rosenlaui. Three months ago. Three years ago. Holmes stares at his friend, winded all over again by the fact that he has not been merely _missing_ all this time.   
  
And it is all very well thinking that it is all the Doctor’s fault, and that he never meant for this to happen. But he _did_ mean to plunge to his death in a blaze of glory. Or at least, he had been far too willing. It had seemed such a fitting, almost a poetic, conclusion. He _did_ deliberately walk away expecting never to see his friend again in this world.   
  
And it was a sacrifice on behalf of his country, yes, yes – but why on earth did he not at least carry a weapon to defend himself? He is only thirty-seven years old (although now, as far as the world is concerned, he will have to get used to being forty). After a few months in the company of a man who is well over a thousand, that seems very young indeed to have decided to throw away the rest of his life.   
  
Holmes snatches his books back with a snarl, for there are dangerous men about and he has already resolved he will attend to this _later._   
  
Then Watson shrugs and walks away and Holmes curses to himself and rushes after him.  
  
* * *  
  
Much later, Moran is in a cell in Scotland Yard, a wax dummy has a bullet through its forehead and Holmes is in his own bedroom at Baker Street. He does not like the thought that Watson has gone home to an empty house any more than he likes being without him here. Tomorrow he will suggest – he will all but _insist_ – that Watson moves back in with him.   
  
He is alive, safe, free. And so very angry.   
  
A pulsing, rushing noise fills the room. The shadows change. Holmes stiffens.  
  
“Holmes,” says a low voice behind him.   
  
Holmes wheels. The TARDIS appears to have swallowed up his wardrobe and is standing in a dark corner as if it had always been there.   
  
“Take me back,” says Holmes.   
  
“I’m sorry,” says the Doctor.  
  
Holmes ignores him. “Correct this. Three years! His wife _died_ , did you know that? She was not yet thirty-two. He lost his best friend and his wife within a year. Can you imagine how that must have felt?”  
  
“Yes,” whispers the Doctor. And Holmes thinks sourly, God forbid anyone should know more than the Doctor about loss or anything else. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”  
  
“ _Stop saying that_. God, your _apologies_!” Holmes brandishes a copy of The Strand. “Have you seen this? ‘A void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to fill!’ ‘The best and wisest man I have ever known!’ And I have been gallivanting around the cosmos _with you_.” The Doctor flinches. “Put this _right_ ,” Holmes scowls at the sight of the Doctor’s sorrowful, wide-eyed expression. “You are going to tell me you cannot.”  
  
“I can’t,” confirms the Doctor, gently. “You’ve entered events. I can move you forward from this point, but... not back. Not to change anything you’ve already done. I really, really can’t.”   
  
Holmes is very tempted to disbelieve this, and contemplates making a dive into the TARDIS and trying to find out for himself.  
  
But even if he managed to get past the Doctor and succeeded in operating the TARDIS, the last thing he can risk now is vanishing God knows where and never coming back.  
  
“What did you tell your friend?” asks the Doctor.  
  
Holmes sits down on his bed and puts his face into his hands. “I told him I staged my own death in order to survive. What else could I say? I had already told Mrs Hudson the same thing, so... I said it was imperative that he should believe it was true. I said Moran had _somehow_ contrived to drive me away from my homeland, and terrorised me so very thoroughly I did not even dare send my only a friend a note mentioning that I was alive.”  
  
The Doctor sticks his hands in his pockets and makes faces as he considers this story. “Well. I think that sounds pretty good.”  
  
“It sounds like the abject nonsense it is!” shouts Holmes, “And that is not the point! It does not undo three years of grief!” he rubs at his forehead. “You are telling me nothing can.”  
  
The Doctor says nothing. Holmes sighs in sheer exhaustion. “Tomorrow I shall have to go through it all again with Mycroft.”  
  
“Oh, he knows you were alive,” says the Doctor.  
  
Holmes’ head snaps up. “ _What?_ ”  
  
“Well, yes. Well, he will know. He will _have_ known. He got telegrams, asking for money and stuff. I haven’t sorted it yet. Kind of a loophole, think I can swing it...”  
  
Holmes seizes on this, desperately, “ Then you can do that for the Doctor – that is, for my friend – surely –”  
  
“I can’t,” repeats the Doctor gently. “Everything a time traveller does, everything he’s part of, becomes fixed. As soon as the two of you saw each other ... ”  
  
“No,” moans Holmes, letting his head fall back into his hands. So if he had only been patient a little longer Watson could have had at least that much comfort. But how could he have known the Doctor would ever return – he _doesn’t_ , as a rule, after all.   
  
There is a silence, then the Doctor asks, “What did he do when you came back?”  
  
“He fainted with shock,” says Holmes curtly.  
  
“And after that?”  
  
Holmes closes his eyes, which have begun to sting at the memory of Watson’s joy. “He forgave me,” he breathes. “Instantaneously. He accepted my excuses without recrimination and almost without question. God knows why. But that is what he did.”  
  
“He knows he’s lucky,” the Doctor says suddenly. “His best friend came back after he lost him forever. Hardly anyone in the universe is as lucky as that.”  
  
“He is not lucky,” retorts Holmes passionately. “ _I_ am; _I_ am unreasonably, disgracefully lucky to have a friend who refuses to abandon me even under such dire provocation.”  
  
The Doctor sighs, and gazes at him as if across an immense distance, “Yeah,” he murmurs, “That too.”  
  
He’s smiling, but he’s got that tragic look on his face again, the oh-poor-me-all-the-universe-to-play-with-and-yet-I-am- _so-alone_ look that usually makes Holmes want to tear his hair out. But on this occasion, quite suddenly, it deflates him. 

  
“Oh, never mind about it, Doctor,” he says, as kindly as he can, “We are both alive, at least, and improbable as it seems to me, we are still friends. I suppose we shall manage.”

“I know you will,” says the Doctor.

He’s stepping back into the TARDIS when Holmes says, “Doctor.” He lifts his head, and, half-grudgingly, meets the Time Lord’s eyes. “I was not ready to die.”

The Doctor grins.

“Told you so,” he says as he disappears.

Holmes shakes his head. The Doctor would have to have the last word.


End file.
